ABSTRACT
At the end of the twentieth century, the fields of dance history and dance criticism remain curiously stunted. While dance itself has made many original contributions to cultural life, the study and analysis of those contributions have been rudimentary. “History” is synonymous with the survey course, an endless recycling of a constructed lineage from the Greeks-or the Egyptians, or the cavemen-to ballet and modern dance. Criticism consists of the stereotypically despised yet sought-after judgment of individuals assumed to have power they don’t really want and don’t actually have. Thus narrowly defined, history and criticism for the most part make no real contribution to dance performance, nor do they significantly inform or complement each other. There is no intellectual infrastructure within the dance field, and-more shocking-no felt need for one.
